pleasure
FOR THREE WINTER months we live in a village in Brittany, in a four-hundred-year-old water mill on an island surrounded by a fast-flowing river, guarded by a goose. It’s quiet. So quiet that when Richard joins me after three weeks—after his work trial is completed—I have no need for him to speak. He’s like the land: hushed, tranquil, calm.
While I wait for Richard to arrive, my friends come to Bretagne for their own reasons. Carole and her daughter Julia come to wander the Bronze Age megaliths near Carnac: menhirs, dolmens, passage graves. Wendy comes to paint and sit in Parisian bars. Grace comes to help me get settled, then sets out for her European tour. In the days we are together, we wander through forests, the sound of hunters’ guns in the distance. The sly renard runs toward our picnic spot, seeking shelter. On meandering Sundays, we watch entire families search for chanterelles, their baskets weighted against their sides. We seek the legendary Brocéliande, the magical forest of Merlin and Vivien. We find the place called Merlin’s tomb, and hang our wishes from its festooned tree. Having stayed past twilight, we walk out of the enchanted forests, barely able to detect our bodies in the dark.
When everyone goes home, Richard and I stay in the quiet. I write letters. Richard naps for hours each day. We go to the market every Saturday and eat an egg and sausage galette for breakfast, followed by a visit to the rotisserie man, the vegetable vendors, and the cheesemonger, who encourages me to learn French from him, a new phrase or two each week. I’m frustrated by my inability to remember the years of French I studied in high school. Not so Richard. He converses with neighbors and boulangerie owners with an unexpected ease.
“Qu’est ce que vous recommandez?” he asks the waiter, and then later, when our plates of omelette fromage and lard tart have been inhaled, “Délicieux repas, monsieur.”
We live in a new rhythm in this place, our days composed of rural pleasures: reading, building fires, retrieving the daily baguette, going to the village market, and creating food à la française. But we mostly sit in the cool stone house and barely speak. We don’t visit the castles or study the architecture. Our minds are not closed to culture, but our animal nature has emerged. We walk, dream, eat, make love. We awake in the fog that comes with living in a millhouse surrounded by a fast-running river. I pad downstairs in my slip and a blanket while Richard sleeps, and I watch fishermen cast their lines from the banks. The men are so close I could open the window and hand them a pain au chocolat.
Crossing Brittany from east to west, the Canal de Nantes à Brest is a chain of canalized rivers: the Erdre, the Isac, the Oust, the Blavet, the Hyère, and the Aulne. All of the social life of the town seems to happen along the water. At twilight, we stroll down the River Oust. We hardly speak anything of the future.
“Can you imagine what it was like when the Neanderthals lived here?”
He looks along the river where it bisects medieval chateaus. “Nomads.”
“We can keep going, you know. Are you tired? I’m not tired.”
“Sure, sweetness.”
“Where did that come from? You never called me that before.”
He raises his shoulders.
“Like it just got conjured out of whatever land you were in before you woke up. Do you remember whether you knew me when you woke up?”
“Yes.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think you did. I think it was like imprinting. I was in the room, and you felt my love, and then as I was there, day after day, you bonded to me.”
“Okay, sweetness.”
“You’re not sad, are you?”
“No.”
“Well, honestly, Richard, I don’t know what makes me ‘me’ either. I can’t track who I am. But there’s a lot of space between us. I remember who we were. And it doesn’t look like we’re going back there.”
“Can we go back now?”
“Just a little bit farther? To that farm? Can you do that?”
He nods his head. His mutton-sized arms flop by his sides like he’s only recently become bipedal. His head falls and he sighs.
I touch his back. “Five minutes.”
His head lifts. The sun sets in a dusky mist along the bog. Bats fly. A Breton dog jumps through the marsh. I take Richard’s hand, for he hasn’t yet thought of taking mine. There’s no need for him to initiate contact. He doesn’t long for anything.
Before Christmas, we decide to visit Florence. We’ve never seen Italy, though we’ve long wished to experience la dolce vita. We take the night train that travels from Rennes to Paris to Florence. Richard sleeps the entire ride, and then much of each afternoon, but he is awake to the art at the Galleria dell’Accademia and the Uffizi, awake in a manner that I have never noticed in him before. He’s immersed in the art, drawn to works that interest him, intent on studying pieces that move him, and able to articulate the impact of the exchange when I question him later, over dinner. He still cannot initiate conversation, but he responds to everything.
“What was your favorite work today?” I ask.
“I like those thirteenth-century paintings on wood, the gold, the Madonnas.”
“Really. That seems kind of stylized for you.”
“You can see that the bodies are moving from flat shapes to actually becoming fully human.”
One day, we are wandering in the Duomo Museum when I’m drawn to a crucifix on the wall. As I come into the gallery, I see a woman sculpted from poplar, her feet gripping as she appears to walk toward her Jesus. It’s the Magdalene, created by Donatello, her body ravaged, her eyes harrowing. I nearly fall to my knees in shock as a wave of sadness erupts. I’m sobbing, thankful that Richard and I are the only ones in the gallery. Richard turns to see if I’m okay, and then he leaves me alone. I squat close to Magdalene’s feet, really looking at their tendons. Her legs and arms are lean, her eyes appear half mad, her lips parched, her teeth broken. Her hair hangs in ropes around her sinewy body. I stand eye to eye with this Mary. Subtle tones move through the wood, her hair gilded in radiant streaks, her muscles terra-cotta and umber.
When you look closely, you can see that she hasn’t wasted away. She’s fierce and unwavering. I’m not reacting to the Mary Magdalene of history, but to this woman I see before me, a woman who appears to have walked across the desert for her man. I see in her the impact of being bonded to someone you adore, someone no longer present. When I leave her, I find Richard a couple of rooms over. In his former self, he would have been perturbed at waiting for me to get on with things. Now he leaves me to my own ways. To be with him is to be peacefully separate. And not in a way that makes me want to throw myself into the Arno.
Later, when we walk the streets around the Duomo, I notice the Italians respond to Richard’s openness. They point to him and invite him into their shops to offer him the end-of-day pastries. They enjoy his obvious appetite for their food. The pensione owner, also a physical therapist, upon hearing of Richard’s brain injury, brings him treats and keeps the halls quiet for his daily naps. I’m jittery about getting lost in the maze of streets, and hesitant to speak the language, and flustered by not knowing the customs. Richard is not challenged in any of the ways that I seem to be. But he isn’t being treated as if he’s a big doofus either. People invite him not for what he’s missing, but for what they see in him.
We stay for five days of gallery visits, afternoon naps, pistachio gelato, and leisurely dinners. On our last evening, we are seated at long wooden tables in a family trattoria. It’s been over a year since his surgery, and he still mostly communicates with his eyes. We try to pronounce things on the menu. We ask for water “with gas.” We’re served polenta with three ragùs—mushroom, marinara, and sausage—triangles we lift to our mouths and cry over. Because we are in a room full of Italians, because we have finally made it to Italy, because we have spent decades wishing to be here, because we can speak with our eyes, we are right at home. In Italy, it is as if our rational, vernacular selves have evaporated, and we are living on tears and elation and lenity.
After we return to Brittany, our children arrive for Christmas, fresh from snowy roads, to simmering soup and platters of sablés, galettes, gaufrettes, and chocolate-dipped meringues. We play games in front of the fire and take the train to Paris and visit the Louvre and the Palais Garnier, and some of us drink too much wine or espresso and sleep late and argue about whether the French waiters want to be assholes or if their petulance just comes naturally.
When the children go back to college, I write and Richard naps. We read for hours each day. By January, he is negotiating the French roads as if their illogical curves are second nature to him. He reads more complex books. He begins to have more energy and invites me to take a stroll, or to help him learn to converse. He wants to learn what people expect from him in conversation. He begins to pick up body cues to orient his communication. He learns to pay attention. We take a final trip to Paris, to our favorite museum, Centre Pompidou. We sit in cafés and talk about art.
“Jesus, man, did you see that guillotine with the word Chanel written on it?”
“Did you see the women who came around the corner and freaked out?”
“Hilarious! I could have stayed in there forever. Except for the close-up of Fuck Painting Number One.”
“That seemed normal to me.”
“It would.”
“What do you think is the difference between pornography and art?”
“You’re really asking?”
He nods. Butters a slice of bread and hands it to me.
“Baby.”
“What?”
“That’s the first time since the brain injury you’ve been curious about me.”
“Huh.”
We’re counting the days until we have to return home, and we’re confused about what “home” is anymore. We’ve happily lived out of suitcases rather than wardrobes. We’ve eaten what’s local and fresh. All winter, reminded of the first night I arrived, when our host made a bread stuffing casserole topped with braised leeks, I’ve tried to make that dish until I got the seasoning just right. Cooking and trips to la laverie have become our social life. We’ve read from the home’s library, we’ve played the homeowner’s music, we’ve learned that pleasure doesn’t come only from knowing what one wants. For months, I’ve been happy in the not knowing. Somehow the choices still get made.
By January, I have offers to house-sit in Galway, Ireland, and in Nice, France, and somewhere in Portugal. Rocky coves, cobblestone streets, sandy beaches. They want us to stay anywhere from three months to a year. I’m nervous about making a commitment, and thrilled to be offered such extraordinary adventures. I still can’t decide where to be. I cry on the phone with my friend-the-therapist, because it’s the first time in my life that I haven’t had intuition about what to do next.
“It is like a black curtain has come down over the future. I can’t see anything!” I wail.
She tells me the story of the manna from heaven, from the Bible’s Exodus, about being in the wilderness and the food showing up, just when you need it.
“I don’t understand how manna is going to happen,” I moan.
“You don’t have to understand,” she says. “The answer arrives.”
The answer does not arrive. Not within me, anyway. One morning, while the fishermen cast their lines in the river, I place my head in Richard’s lap and I cry about not knowing.
“I want to be close to the kids again,” he says. “I want to go back to the States.”
The man without preferences knows what he wants. Our manna from heaven.
Within a few weeks, we have an offer to come live in a ranch house in a vineyard in San Luis Obispo, California, where I’ll help a new bed-and-breakfast owner get on her feet. We pack our bags and thank our foreign place, one that’s given me a chance not to know.
In the airport lounge where we wait to return to the United States, the first thing I notice is the loudness of the American voices. Some woman in a tracksuit who hasn’t eaten red meat for a week shouts out her need for a rare steak. A pair of American women discuss their children, in voices strident enough for us to hear about their GPAs, their summer programs. A belligerent man takes to smoking in the no-smoking zone, yelling at his wife: “Fuck off! Leave me alone! I told you I wasn’t going to take it!” The change in tone is so abrasive that I start to do the breathing meditation that Pema Chödrön teaches. I’m breathing in his disgusting sadism, trying to transform this bile to loving calm. Shit. This is not working fast enough. The young bohemian couple across the room is transfixed and appalled by the way the man demeans his wife. People try to look the other way and can’t. I want to heave my bag of books on his head.
There must be an injection of love in the room, I think. I throw my arms around my husband, kiss him in the way I’ve watched French couples kiss each other in museums, on the streets, in the train stations. I run my hands along Richard’s hair, adoring him. Maybe because he’s been living in France too, he kisses me back, heartily. In the airport we fill ourselves up with love, suffuse our hair and skin and words with sensuality. Not the shout-it-from-the-billboard kind of kissing, but the kind we saw in front of the frightening Rousseau painting at the Musée d’Orsay, the young man and woman turning their heads toward each other under War, their kiss an antidote, a communication of what could not be said, a politeness even, a way to hold the exposure to tragedy inside, among a roomful of visitors.
The kiss showed itself to us, consumed us, really, in our trips to Paris. In the Marais one Saturday night we had dinner at a communal table, our ears trying to pick up the patter of a barely known language in the conversation of the two men sitting next to us. We understood everything in the way the curly-headed one twirled the ring on the finger of the one with the sideways grin, then leaned over and kissed his palm. The next morning, rushing to find a café that served omelets, I stopped to watch the reflection in a pâtisserie window: a middle-aged woman wrapped her arm around another woman’s head, leaned in, bit her lover’s ear. I had been hungry for this, as it turned out. In another country I was satiated by the calm ease with which the gestures transpired, an effortlessness so transparent that it made me grieve for the loss of it on the streets of my own life.
The kissing in the airport calms me; I’m not sure what effect it has on the screaming man, but he stops the tirade. Ten hours later we are in a hotel room in Detroit, where we will wait for the next flight. My husband, he of the magnificent French kiss, turns on the television. From across the room I see him flip through ESPN and local news and stock-exchange rattle, and the world we created over there starts to slide away. All I can manage is: “I can’t watch this crap. I can’t do it. I’m going out.” But Richard doesn’t let me. He turns off the television and we banter back and forth a few minutes, and because we have been to many countries that have changed us, because we act as if the world we have agreed to let in is kind, we go back to trying to understand each other. We make a compromise, one that involves his need for a film in English, and my desire to soak in hot water. Later we eat pizza and a hamburger from the hotel restaurant. We ask, “What do you want to keep from over there?”
I want to keep turning toward the people I disagree with, learning to respect them through the exchange of ideas. I want to know when to kiss in silence, when to erupt in hearty dialogue. I tell my husband about how, on our last day at the Pompidou, I watched two men, one American and one French, get into a conflict about architecture as they exited a design exhibition.
“It’s the functionality, the ability to work,” said the American.
“But if there are no quality materials, then the design is a failure!” said the Frenchman.
And then the American hung back, holding his disagreement in his silence, unwilling to go out on the limb of conflict.
“We rely on the quality, n’est-ce pas?” said the Frenchman again, wanting the conversation to continue. Behind him a large color photograph of a Madonna concert glared, its circus aspects amplified by the image’s giant stature. This is how our country is, I thought: we are big and bold, especially when the way is ours to take, when the performance is one that we control. We often cannot hear the question mark that entreats us into conversation; our discussion ends when the world’s is just beginning. The American man nodded his head; that was enough. The Frenchman walked with him, explaining more.
Richard and I hold hands across the table and remember one of our last hikes along the canal. We try to hold in our memory the people milling in the charcuterie, the polite bonsoir we heard along the trail as other couples performed this daily ritual of the sunset stroll. We ache to remember the polite conversation, the peaceful gathering of such places, the way it has both civilized us and brought us to our wildish heart. That day, as we crossed the street toward the woods, a strange form came into my sight line. A flock of about a hundred birds moved across the sky from south to north, in a revolving wave that replicated the shape of a DNA strand.
“Oh my God!” I said, as I stared. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
My husband, transfixed, shook his head. As the birds rotated within their shape they also flew across the sky, a spiral moving on an axis, each bird holding its position through flight and stasis. We speculated on what held them in this exact shape without the form disintegrating: perhaps their calls, perhaps their relationship to each other, perhaps a flutter of the wing. The birds disappeared behind the towers of a castle, and we stood for a moment to breathe, holding hands, trying to take in what we had witnessed. It was too much to speak of—we didn’t have the meaning, and yet the birds were already inside us, shaping us, the fact that their form had happened, this magic at twilight.
Over the first American dinner my husband hands me the olives from his drink, keeps one for himself.
“What’s necessary now?” I ask. “How do you want to live?”
He’s ready to go back to work, but he also wants the quiet of rest, the spaciousness of naps, the inner sanctum of reading.
“What else?” I press.
He looks at me, open-eyed, wonder streaming through the jet lag. He tries to speak but cannot find the words. It’s okay because when I kiss him later I will understand: he wants to remember that it happened; he wants to keep all the not-knowing that sits at the center of a mystery.